engleski

Sports metaphors in English legal discourse

Sports metaphors are figurative expressions frequently used in business, political and legal discourse. The concepts of sprint, marathon and raising the bar that originate in track-and-field as a source domain, a boxing-related below the belt, kick-off in soccer, or game, set, match emanating from tennis are well known both to general public as well as to particular domain experts. As for the legal discourse, they are used by judges, researchers and journalists alike, thus flavouring the otherwise rather dry and strict discourse of court decisions, their newspaper commentaries or research articles of law-related subject matters. Past research on the subject matter mostly had two foci. On the one hand, it focused on the appropriateness of using sports metaphors in judicial context (Oldfather, 1994), for example, when explaining a court decision, or when identifying judges with umpires (Zelinsky, 2010). This was done by analysing sports metaphors' meaning both in the source domain, i.e. sports, and in the target domain, i.e. law. Some authors view this matter in the sense that sports metaphors are superfluous and that they jeopardize the unambiguousness of legal discourse in general. Others juxtaposed, to a greater or lesser extent, this point of view thus advocating the usage of metaphors (e.g. Benforado, 2011). On the other hand, past research concentrated on sports metaphors used in various types of legal context, e.g. judicial opinions, opening statements, etc. (Boyd, 2014). Such analyses were substantiated by listing numerous examples of using sports metaphors in various types of texts. The analysis in this paper will rely on sports metaphors' semantic functions in law-related target domains. Following the methodology applied by Boyd (2014) and Abrams (2010), sports metaphors will first be classified by sport from which they originate, followed by the explanation of their meaning in source and target domains. Further, sports metaphors will be scrutinized by the type of text in which they have been used – be it, for example, a court decision, a newspaper/magazine commentary or a law-related professional text (e.g. Sampsell-Jones, 2010). Analysis will be directed towards a sample comprising sports metaphors in which those that have not been analysed previously in past research will prevail. Some examples of metaphors will also be discussed upon cross-tabulating sport and the type of text in which they were found. Finally, attention will be drawn to cultural differences that govern the usage of certain sports metaphors.

sport ; metaphor ; law ; discourse

nije evidentirano